


A Last Time for Everything

by orphan_account



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003), Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Age Difference, Canon Compliant, F/M, Immortality, Just grab some Kleenex and a tub of ice cream immediately., Original Character Death(s), Pre-Canon, Tissue Warning, Tragedy, Unfortunate Implications
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 10:48:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He meets her for the first time in the kitchen of her house, her left hand clutching a velveteen teddy bear, her right hand rubbing at her sleepy two-year-old eyes. With her pupils wide from the darkness, she watches him surprisingly expectantly while he silently bursts black from his elbows to the tips of his claws to silence her.</p>
<p>“Mama said the tooth faery’s a lady.” Her complaint is accompanied by a tilting of her head, not unlike a bird. “You don’t look like a lady. But here’s my tooth.” Lifting her arm she unfurls her fingers to reveal a pearly white thing in the centre of her creased palm. “Where are my cenz?”</p>
<p>“How many?”</p>
<p>She squints at him. “You don’t know how much you’re s’posed to pay for tooths?” A pause. He shifts his weight forward, bends his right knee, curls his left claws at just the right angle to disembowel her. “I think it’s like half a cen.”</p>
<p>-------------------------------------------------------</p>
<p>Being immortal sounds fantastic until you realise the rest of the world isn't. There's a first time for everything. And, as Greed would discover, a last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Last Time for Everything

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty old, but I wanted to cross-post it here on AO3 anyway. Here's the original Author's Note that went with the story, FFN formatting and all. Although I have retitled the fic to avoid confusion as to which language it is written in, the original title was "Montaña Rusa", or "Rollercoaster". Please enjoy!
> 
> A/N: This concerns the unfortunate implications of the immortality of homunculi in conjunction with their more human traits.
> 
> There are multiple references in this story, so I’d like to take the chance to point some of them in addition to a few other things. The main events take place in the early 1700s, which is approximately when Greed would have been created, and life expectancy at that age was thirty-five, less for a female; if you’re not convinced, do some of your own research!
> 
> The title of the fic, _Montaña Rusa_ , is a reference to a song of the name by Amaral. The song, translated in English, is “Rollercoaster”.  “Montaña Rusa” inspired the fic itself, and I felt that the lyrics were quite applicable. Particularly, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the main chorus; the lyrics have been loosely translated by yours truly, so please alert me if there’s a mistake:
> 
> _Perdida como un perro voy_
> 
> _En busca de aventuras_
> 
> _Perdida sin saber quien soy_
> 
> _En la montaña rusa,_
> 
> [. . .]
> 
> _Y no sé dónde voy a ir:_
> 
> _No hay nada que me ate aquí._
> 
> _Perdida sin saber quien soy,_
> 
> _En la montaña rusa._
> 
> In English:
> 
> _Lost and confused like a stray dog, I wander_
> 
> _In search of adventures and thrills,_
> 
> _Lost without knowing who I am_
> 
> _On the roller coaster (of life)._
> 
> [. . .]
> 
> _And I don’t know where I’m going:_
> 
> _There’s nothing to keep me here._
> 
> _Lost without knowing who I am,_
> 
> _On the roller coaster (of life)._
> 
> I think it’ll become clear where the title of the story comes in. Hopefully it’ll be a bit of an ‘aha!’ moment for you.
> 
> As for the references, there are two to other fanfictions. I will edit in links to the fics as soon as I’m able to find them again. The first is to an absolutely wonderful Royai story whose very summary is something to the extent of, “A lifetime of women and all he ever wanted was her, Ishbal be damned.” The second is actually a Homestuck fic, an erisol one that involves one of the characters dying of old age; it is from this fic that the image of the observatory burning was culled. Again, these references will begin to make sense once you continue along the fic.
> 
> Incidentally, alternate titles for the story included “Teeth”, “The Perks of Being Mortal”, and “Stray Dog”. With that in mind, enjoy reading “Montaña Rusa”!

He meets her for the first time in the kitchen of her house, her left hand clutching a velveteen teddy bear, her right hand rubbing at her sleepy two-year-old eyes. With her pupils wide from the darkness, she watches him surprisingly expectantly while he silently bursts black from his elbows to the tips of his claws to silence her.

“Mama said the tooth faery’s a lady.” Her complaint is accompanied by a tilting of her head, not unlike a bird. “You don’t look like a lady. But here’s my tooth.” Lifting her arm she unfurls her fingers to reveal a pearly white _thing_ in the centre of her creased palm. “Where are my cenz?”

“How many?” His voice is smooth, suave, intended to disarm, to attract, to seduce. It offers no warmth or comfort to a girl barely old enough to be out of diapers.

She squints at him. “You don’t know how much you’re s’posed to pay for tooths?” A pause. He shifts his weight forward, bends his right knee, curls his left claws at just the right angle to disembowel her. “I think it’s like half a cen.”

Uncarbonising his other hand, he slips it into his pocket. The smooth half-cen coin glimmers faintly as he drops it into her palm and plucks the white thing up, balancing it on his index finger. A tooth. How fragile humans are, to lose such a vital part of their bodies forever and ever. And how idiotic humans are, to expect payment in return for dying. Though perhaps monetary compensation is the only way to mentally justify their own mortality.

Still, giving away free—teeth? She gave it to him and to him alone. For half a cen, so essentially free, as he would charge far, far more for his teeth if he could remove them. Avarice must have kept her from merely handing it to him; he knows he can’t give anything away without _some_ thing in exchange. Eyeing her, waiting for her trick, he adds it to his collection of odds and ends. The girl is inspecting the coin as though it were counterfeit, which it is of course, and tries to nibble on the edge.

“Do’ya want anythin’ to eat?” she asks finally, apparently satisfied. “I know Father Winter likes milk’n cookies. Want some?”

The laugh that bubbles out of his stomach is his first relaxed moment in days. Unsurprisingly, running across half the country to escape a pair of vicious homunculi does not a fun three months make.

“Is your mama going to be mad at me?” He chuckles yet takes a seat at the table. Lighting a candle, the girl stares at him for a good minute, two, three, before lifting her shoulders and pointing to a ceramic blue jar in the shape of an elephant, perched high atop a counter where a young girl this small couldn’t possibly reach.

“Not if we’re real quiet.” She giggles to herself; he removes the jar from the counter and hands it to her, but not before extracting his price of three cookies. “You’re funny-lookin’ for a tooth faery.”

“You’re funny-lookin’, period.” Her reddish hair has been cut in the shape of a bowl, and her enormous brown eyes don’t exactly fit with the fiery mop on her head. “Dumbass kid.” She purses her lips, and he can’t help but laugh again. “Where’s that milk?”

She grins. “Got a name there, mister?”

He shrugs. The collar of his overcoat tickles his lower jaw.

“Call me Greed.”

He comes by her house every night. It’s a silly but welcome respite from what he does while the sun is still up, a few hours’ break from the constant fear of shadowed blades carving out his heart until the stone in his hourglass runs out. Hell, the food’s a great bonus, and the broken window latch means he can duck in whenever he wants and spend the night in the shelter of the kitchen floor. “Ssh,” he murmurs, stroking her unruly mass of hair, “your parents can’t see me, so they’ll think you’re _weeeird_ if you tell ‘em ‘bout me.” It’s not a _lie_ : They are capable of seeing him, but they _can’t_ , or he’ll have to put them down.

Nodding solemnly, she doesn’t seem to notice the moustache of milk gracing her upper lip.

She hates that she can’t go to school with the boys. He doesn’t ever remember attending school, but it’s a Human Thing, so he doesn’t inquire. Instead he twirls a pen expertly in his hand and writes the alphabet in blocky letters across the top of a sheet of paper.

She sits in his lap and watches and listens, and he finds that he almost wishes he had a childhood.

Almost.

She’s nine years old when her father dies. No one pays any mind to the man in black, hovering at the outskirts of the funeral, staring at a satin coffin being lowered into the ground, staring at wood obscuring a body maimed by his claws, staring at a young girl held by her mother’s arms. It wasn’t her father’s fault that he walked into the kitchen at the wrong moment, not when shadows pooled around the dark intruder hidden beneath the table but when lamplight revealed a strange man ruffling the hair of his daughter. If anything, he’s mildly surprised it took so long.

She’s nine years old when he waits in her kitchen again, as has been their agreement for as long as he hopes she can remember. She’s nine years old when she hesitantly opens the door to find him sitting at her table with a box of fresh Cretan croissants. Reimbursement for taking a life, he thinks. She’s nine years old when she wants to know why he murdered her father.

He’s a little over seven years old when he answers that he was protecting his own life. A life for a life. Plus croissants. Fair, right?

She’s nine years when she decides to continue trusting him.

And trusting him.

And trusting him.

He finds it easy to adapt to their new house in Daten. Apparently her mother couldn’t bear to continue living in Risenburg. Out of grief, she explains. Typical human reactions to death. Perhaps her father hadn’t sold all of his teeth or other miscellaneous body parts before he died; he honestly can’t fathom another reason for their suffering. But their new house, with its spacious back patio and its easily picked back door lock, and the city around it, with its high levels of crime and ridiculously pitiful police department, are perfect for his intentions. Naturally such a large house in such a terrible area was cheap; otherwise, he wouldn’t have recommended it to her to pass on to her mother.

In the day he runs with the wolves: A gang known as the Black Dogs is more than happy to take him on a bodyguard, especially after a display of his particular skills, a display that left half a body on the ground, with the other half tossed to the sewer rats. He becomes adept at stealing, pickpocketing, killing without a trace, smooth-talking, the rest.

By the time she’s thirteen years old, he’s bested the former leader in hand-to-hand combat. A new name, then. The Black Diamonds. For the carbon he can rip from the covering humans call ‘skin’ and reform into the hardest material known to man or beast. A shield of black diamond to symbolise the Black Diamonds.

He’s so clever that he’s rendered dumbfounded by his own wit.

When she misplaces the teddy bear her father gave her for her second birthday, he tears apart the schoolboy who filched it from her satchel while she was delivering food to the young scholars. The police chief shrugs at a lack of evidence as he munches on crystallised pineapple left on his desk that morning by his friendly neighbourhood Black Diamond runner. She smiles so brightly he swears the sun has descended to her patio and hugs him so tightly he can feel her developing curves against his chest.

He ignores it. She’s sixteen and definitely underage.

Except that the other boys from the private school don’t understand that. The food delivery job pays her enough each week that she can spend her nights learning the maths and science shoved in his head by his _dearest_ daddy for no reason except that they might’ve proven useful one day, if he’d stayed with the homunculi. Yet she doesn’t come home the first day of spring, and her mother paces, worried, on the front porch.

His claws sink into her would-be assailant’s flesh the moment he rounds the corner, and the beast-boy drops as heavily as the first stone cast. “Thank you,” she whispers; he wraps his overcoat around her topless form and walks her home. “The vest looks nice on you. You should make the ruff fluffier, though.”

He can tell she’s grasping at anything to say to avoid speaking about the events that almost transpired. But he wears the vest more often. And he replaces the ruff of cotton with the fluffiest fur he can find.

“So what do you want for your birthday? Not every day you turn eighteen, you know.”

It’s not free, he tells himself to appease the gnawing hole of avarice deep in his belly. It fills up, just a little, whenever she’s around, but even then the sin continues to whisper in his ear to take the glittery jewellery he sees in the shop window, to take the bodacious baker pausing out back for a quick smoke, to take the barely concealed cenz from the money belt of the wealthy doctor stepping into his coach, the two horses pulling it plumed with ridiculous violet-feathered headdresses. It’s not free at all; it’s more than equivalent exchange for the service of food and shelter she’s provided.

She stands on her tiptoes—the dress she’s wearing is a beautiful silvery-white, one that gives the illusion of ample breasts when her chest has barely developed from when she was fourteen and accentuates the widening hips showcasing her womanhood where her upper torso doesn’t—to wrap her arms around his shoulders and interlock her fingers at the nape of her neck. “How about a kiss?”

The patrons inside the café pay the two standing just outside no mind. Her mother is aware that she’s gone out with some friends; her mother doesn’t know that said friend is the head of the Black Diamonds and doesn’t have to know.

“A kiss?” He quirks an eyebrow at her. “I was thinking more ‘long the lines of a kitten, or a new velocipede, or another book on astronomy . . .”

Her eyes twinkle in the exact hue of quicksand pulling him in until he drowns. He supposes that if he were to be kept under the surface long enough, he would actually drown. But he doesn’t want to think of that, nor of the steadily weakening hum of the philosopher’s stone hidden in his chest. Instead he focuses on the scent of crepes drifting from the counter of the diner. “Uwah, of course I want the book.” Blushing, she stretches herself even further until their noses touch. “But I want a kiss, too. Most girls my age are _married_ , and you still treat me like a child. Not every day I turn eighteen!”

“Mm, I’ll think about it.” He glances towards the moon hanging low in the sky, reminding him how young the night is.

The frown that curves her lips in a downwards arc etches claw-marks on his heart, but then she inhales the scent of crepes and smiles once more. “You’d better get me those powdered crepes.”

Streaks of chocolate colour her skin dark above her lips, and he grins at her. She wants to know why, but he merely chuckles and devours his own meal in three quick bites. Two flutes of white wine are drained to the stem. Though he can’t get drunk, a side effect of his stone healing any significant changes to his body, he can sense her disorientation in the way she sways ever so slightly with each step, the motion merely serving to further emphasis her hips. He’s seen more shapely sixteen-year-olds, of course, yet seeing her with such a figure when he met her as a young child is . . . startling to say the least.

Still, he slides his arm under hers and rests his hand on her lower back to steady her. Certainly she didn’t consume enough to be drunk, and given that it’s _Daten_ , it would be unreasonable to presume she’s a stranger to liquor. “Are you all right?”

“Drunk off happiness,” she murmurs, smiling shyly at him; her blush spreads across her features, and he feels his own face grow hot. Funny, how his cheeks never flush in the presence of even the most gorgeous femme fatale but manage to flush in hers. Damn everything. “Sho . . . that kissh?”

He knows that she knows that he knows the drunken slur is fake. She stops walking. With her pupils wide from the darkness, she watches him surprisingly expectantly.

The smile that parts his lips is a warm one, and the tongue that parts his lips even further is hot and wet and sends blinding lightning from his spine to the tips of his fingers and toes. He’s fairly certain that she can feel him pressing against her with his too-tight pants. The stone might take away the pain, but it doesn’t take away the arousal.

Damn everything to hell.

Her scent, her hair, grown-out now to her shoulders, falling over his face, her nails digging into his back through the vest, her long fingers splayed against his shoulder blades, her lids swept sultrily low over her eyes . . .

He lets go of the collar of her dress; she falls back, rolling on the balls of her heels, and he tries to relax the sudden tension in the muscles of his arms and thighs. “Th-thank you,” she gasps, one hand on her chest, the other sheepishly rubbing the back of her head. “Not every day I turn eighteen.”

The bookstore clerk wraps the gift in bright silver wrapping paper. He leaves it at the foot of her bed and exits out the window to take an infinite shower. He stays in long after the hot water runs out, praying to whatever gods he doesn’t believe in that the icy spray make him feel even slightly less dirty.

The night her mother is murdered is as cool and crisp as a sheet of glass. She’s laughing at a lame joke involving a camel and two merchants from Xing when he sees the broken front door. Her mother’s body is crucified against the wall with each limb torn at the seams and hung separately from the torso. A serpentine mark has been carved from her left breast to her sliced-open genitals, the mark of the Vipers.

She spends the night crying in a hotel room while he holds her in his lap and strokes her hair and tells her it’s going to be all right and whispers sweet words in her ears and pretends her warm weight isn’t giving him an erection. He’s a dirty fuck and he hates himself so much he might as well hatemarry himself.

The Vipers have a personal vendetta against the Black Diamonds; Daten was once their turf, but now that he has the police in the palm of his sable hand and controls most of the gang members in the entirety of the city, it’s a different story. Yet the green-tattooed Vipers, knowing full well that the Black Diamond himself is impossible to kill, or so the stories say, try another tactic, the vilest one in the book.

It’s this tale that he beats out of a caught Viper spy later, a spy rolling in a puddle of his own vomited blood. It’s this tale that does absolutely nothing for her but does _death_ for every single Viper in Daten. Every single Viper, disembowelled, a serpentine mark carved from their left breasts to their genitals. An alchemist marked for death activates the circle; the Vipers screech in agony just prior to their final deaths. The word is irony, yet the taste on his tongue is bitter hate.

The first time he makes love to her he doesn’t mean to do so. He starts kissing her to take her mind off of the death, and his hands find themselves on the swell of her breasts, and the buttons on her pants—men’s pants, to avoid arousing suspicion of why a girl of twenty-one is out this late—comes undone when he isn’t looking, and her tears cease the moment her moaning begins, and the next morning he shoots himself in the head before realising that it was nothing but a waste of a bullet.

The older women in town have been discussing the girl for a few years now, their wrinkled, toothless mouths flapping at one another: “An old maid. Unmarried at nineteen, twenty, twenty-one? Who jilted her that she continues to pine for a lost love? This is what comes of girls growing up without fathers. Mark my words,” they rasp over the clickity-click of sewing needles, “nothing good will come of a spinster. Nothing good at all!”

They attend her mother’s funeral; he holds an umbrella over her head. The high collar of her dress does little to hide the violet, violent bruise blossoming across the side of her neck and chest or the red welts of bite marks trailing patterns of love over her tender flesh. He didn’t mean to hurt her, but he wanted her so badly he thinks he lost control sometime in the middle of it all. Quietly he promises himself he won’t be as rough. Quietly he examines the new signs of pain etched into her body the following morning.

By the end of the week it’s evolved from a curious combination of pity and lust to something he’s fairly certain would be called ‘love’ if they were characters in a cenz smut novel instead of life. She clings to him more desperately than she did when she was a child, her independence and strength washed away in the wake of her mother’s death, yet every night when he returns to the hotel, he finds her bare and wet and willing.

Some small shadowy part of him wonders if she isn’t sleeping with him out of fear that he’ll leave, but his avarice burns brightly, burns away the darkness of generosity, burns hot in his head and his heart and his loins. He takes her, as he does any other object, yet by the end of the month he _knows_ the fire in his chest isn’t merely the victorious bear crowing his triumph in sin. Love, he thinks. Love, he hopes against hope. Love, he murmurs into her ear as he holds ice folded in cloth to the newest marks of his desire, as her tears wet his shoulder and pool at his collarbone. At the very least she needs not worry about pregnancy, he tells himself to clean some hint of the dirt from his soul, nor about cleaning up after him.

Everything that comes from a homunculus, after all, bursts into energy and dust the moment it breaks its connection to the philosopher’s stone.

He prays it doesn’t apply to her.

“I love you,” she says one day over a morning cup of coffee.

He freezes where he is, listening to the shatter of his mug breaking against the floor. Kneeling, he collects the fragments in his bare hands, arcs of scarlet sparks healing the cuts in his palms. “Really?”

Closing the illustrated manual of the night skies she’d been perusing, she bows her head. Some of the fire in her eyes has returned. “I love you. I really do.”

The fragments crumble to dust in his closed, carbonised palms. “There’s no such thing.” He won’t let her fall in love with him. She deserves . . . so much more . . .

“There’s no such thing as no such thing.” Her fingers trace a particularly nasty bruise on her lower abdomen; he runs his tongue over his sharks’ teeth and stares at his hands. “I do love you, stupid. Even if you don’t know anything ‘bout the stars.”

“Why should I know anything ‘bout the stars when I’ve got my hands full just tryin’ to keep us alive down here on Earth?” She laughs, and he reaches out to ruffle her hair. “You’ll be in the stars one day, y’know? And I hope I can catch some of the light comin’ off of you that day.”

His woman beams, and a weight lifts from his chest. He passes the telescope installed in the window and exits out the door for another day of hunting down victims. Rapists, murderers, thieves. Anyone she wouldn’t be angry at him for sacrificing.

He’s already found a willing alchemist.

A day spent slaughtering, and he returns to what he tentatively refers to as ‘home’ to find her waiting not at the telescope but beneath the sheets. She’s wearing something scarlet and ruffled and lacy, something that she would never ever wear, but her hand slips under his boxers and it’s all over. Until the bite mark he leaves on her shoulder disappears in a dance of crimson light. The homunculus held up against the wall, xer throat nearly crushed beneath the force of his carbonised claws, writhes in constant agony as xe reverts to xer usual form: Black spikes of hair sprout from xer head like a palm tree; violet, bulging eyes glare at him with a wrathful fury; and the ouroboros mark is displayed on the creature’s outer thigh.

“So our daddy dearest’s made more of us, huh?” His eyes narrow while xe continues to struggle. The crackle of stone energy continuously repairing the damages brought on by a lack of oxygen brings a cruel smirk to his lips. “ _Where is she?_ ” He relaxes his fingers just enough for the philosopher’s stone to heal xer crushed vocal cords.

“Dead, moron,” xe hisses gleefully. Xer scream of agony cuts off.

“ _Where is she, you lying bastard?_ ” Choking, the creature lifts a hand in the direction of the closet. Still holding xim in one hand, he rips open the closet door, and there she is, bound, gagged, and covered in cuts. He drops the creature and embraces her, cradles her, promises her that he’s never going to let her be hurt like this again, and then he stands to stare at the instigator agent, cowering in fear, at the centre of the bed. He tears xim apart again and again until there is absolutely nothing left but a tiny green leech that skitters away on the floor.

“You have your carbonised form,” xe spits. He throws himself to the floor, attempts to grab it before it can squeeze into a crack in the wall. “Next time we meet, I’ll ask Father to give me something that even _you_ can’t defeat, idiot!”

It is the first time she sees him in his true form, a carbonised demon from hell.

It is the second time she tells him that she loves him.

She winces as the saddle bumps against her myriad of lacerations, and the horse is frothing at the mouth when the dawn shines pink over Dublith.

Their new home, he thinks, and one where the other homunculi are less apt to find them.

No one questions the twenty-seven-year-old man who suddenly opens an observatory on the outskirts of Dublith. With his oddly soft manner of speaking and his fair, almost angelic features surrounded by a shock of fiery hair, he arouses the interest of bachelorettes in the town who whisper that he _must_ be rich to afford such state of the art equipment. They think nothing of the other man they often see hanging about the observatory. A brother, they murmur to one another, or an old friend, since they appear to be around the same age. After all, the blood of the covenant runs thicker than the water of the womb.

He holds her every night and presses wet kisses to every square centimetre of her body. The corners of her eyes and mouth have always wrinkled when she grinned, yet they no longer smooth out when her smile drops away. It frightens him to no end. He kisses them and kisses them and kisses them yet they deepen every single day and there’s nothing he can do about it. Though he searches through the notes left in his mind by the Dwarf in the Flask, his sole tools are seduction, murder, and carbonisation. He has nothing to give her, and although he _can_ transfer philosopher’s stone, her soul is an electromagnetic pulse and unfit to accept stone. He wishes he knew how to convert one to the other. But not even the alchemists of Dublith can do that, and for wasting his time he wasted the rest of their lives; he bitterly hopes they enjoy living two metres under.

“You don’t age, do you?” she asks him after a night of wild sex.

“Mm.” He slides his arms out from under her and rolls away from her to stare at the wall.

Her voice trembles. “W-what will you do when I . . . ?”

“Don’t.” His words are tired. He’s tired, and his philosopher’s stone was replenished less than a year ago. In the quiet, if he listens, he can hear the tortured screams of the souls tucked away inside of him. The ones his _dearest_ father utilised to create him. The Vipers. The criminals of Daten City. “Don’t. _Please_.” His timbre cracks.

They spend the night on opposite sides of the bed. His eyes water, yet the tears never reach the pillow.

The money from Daten runs out, but she is content to live on the cenz made from the observatory. Farmers come for advice on their plantings and harvests, young girls and boys for love predictions made in the stars, townspeople for divining and fortune-telling: She doesn’t believe in astrology, yet it’s a lucrative business. He waits in the shadows, half-content with her happiness, half-worried about the avarice gnawing in his innards again. She might help fill the void, but the fact that he has lost his fortune and is barely gaining anything in return is physically painful.

He’ll hold out for her.

He begs his sin to give him that long. Just that long, dammit.

When he catches her kneeling over a metal washtub, her fingers kneading scarlet dye into her hair, he struggles not to do something stupid. Instead he catches her wrist, forces her onto the bed, and tips the basin over. The dyed water spills over the floor and pools at her feet. Blood. It looks like blood, her blood, in a puddle around her.

“What were you doin’?”

She watches the water ripple gently.

“When I go, you’ll be sad,” she whispers, and in that moment she is two years old and clutching a teddy bear. “I don’t want you to be sad, not because of me.”

He rummages through the closet until his hands close around the worn fur of the velveteen bear. Pulling it out he inspects it; one of its button eyes has disappeared, and nausea shoots bile up his throat, a malfunction easily repaired within seconds by the philosopher’s stone humming away within him. “I’m leaving,” he tells her the following morning.

She nods. “When will you be back?”

“When I find a way to turn you immortal.”

“What if I don’t want to be?”

The longing contorting his features must break something in her; her eyebrows sweep downwards into the very expression of misery. “A way to turn humans immortal? There’s no such thing.”

The words are heavy, heavy in his mouth. “There’s no such thing as no such thing.”

He comes back two years older with seventeen new murders under his belt, a body that hasn’t changed one iota, and a broken dream that can never fly again. He counts the wrinkles on her face and hands, observing their increase with every passing day; the idea of gaining new wrinkles, as ridiculous as it sounds, appeases his greed if merely a little. “I’m still young, you big dummy.”

“You’re thirty-six,” he counters.

“You’re thirty-four.” She sticks her tongue out, but the childish gesture does nothing to hide the creases of her lips.

“I’m an immortal demon.”

Laughing, she plucks a grey hair from her scalp and twirls its coarse length between two swollen fingers. “I’m a mortal human. Are we going to keep statin’ the obvious, because it’s raining outside.”

He glances outwards towards the window. She chuckles.

How easy it is for humans to lie, to fib, to deceive the ones they love the most in their desperate attempts to keep the pain away for as long as possible.

They make love again that night, slowly. He hates the boredom he feels lurking at the back of his head, but she can’t take it much more quickly. All he can do is pray that this will not be the last night, will not be the last time he sees her mouth open in pleasure, will not be the last second he hears his name whispered on a breath without care.

When he climaxes and screams her name, it is a single instant of a perfect moment. But like all things, the perfect moment comes to an end.

She loses her first tooth biting into an apple. “Ho, tooth faery,” she calls. “Where’s my half-cen?”

The women in town no longer giggle about the astronomer with his thirty-eight years. He hears a handful considering wooing him, poisoning his evening tea to make it seem like an accident, and taking his fortune. The police scratch their heads and wonder at the four corpses found disembowelled on the same night. They call him Logan the Ripper and send out warnings to nearby towns of some serial killer out for the blood of virgin sacrifices.

He leaves bread soaking in sugared milk and minces meat into an almost liquid pulp for her to eat. She sinks into the pillows, complaining that humans die so young. “We should live to eighty-eight at least,” she announces, “like the old men of Xerxes did in the legends.”

“When you live to eighty-eight I’ll be sure to throw you a party. We’ll stargaze all night’n everythin’.”

Her smile is sad. She swallows her bread and sleeps.

“I love you,” she says every morning and every night.

“Love you more,” he counters every morning and every night. “Love you forever.”

When he understands that she wants those to be the last words they exchange, he traces hearts down her arms and murmurs, “You can’t die. You’re my possession’n I refuse to let you die, and who ever heard of a possession going ‘gainst her owner’s wishes? There’s no such thing.”

With her pupils wide from the darkness, she watches him surprisingly expectantly. “There’s no such thing as no such thing.”

He’s a miserable fuck and he hates himself so much he might as well hatemarry himself.

It’s not as though he were smart enough to go and marry her while she was still young.

The morning she doesn’t wake up is the morning Dublith awakens to find the observatory burning. He doesn’t look as he leaves, but he hopes the inside of the flames could be as hot as the stars she would watch floating overhead.

He’s a stray dog with nowhere to go. He can’t return to the Black Diamonds; they’ll be suspicious of his apparent lack of aging, and the Dwarf in the Flask will hear about an immortal being in the vicinity of an area to which he’s already been. He can’t remain in Dublith for the same. So he moves, from place to place, from one side of Amestris to the other, never staying in the same place for long, never staring at the same face for long, never letting the glass balloon of his heart go.

Everything hurts and it will never be all right again. It’s impossible. Time cannot heal all wounds. Nothing can heal all wounds.

There’s no such thing.

He spends his eighty-eighth birthday reigniting the legend of Logan the Ripper.

Without her the hole of greed within him, supressed for forty-two years, widens and deepens until it has become a black hole sucking away whatever happiness he has. Centuries of taking objects, taking lives, taking women—nothing. His victims scream, ask him what he wants.

“Everything,” he says.

“Her,” he means.

A lifetime of women, and all he ever wanted was her, avarice be damned.

They say he’s the manifestation of greed, but he’s not. Not really. Time takes all, wears down mountains, dries up seas, turns fire to ash, takes everything and everyone in the truest, purest form of the sin he’s supposed to be. For time, nothing will never be enough.

A century passes. Two. He comes back to Dublith after running out of places to go and finds some meat shop occupying the space where the old observatory once sat. The town has grown into a bustling city, spreading in rings far beyond the quaint village he lived in for years. His anger is so vile and so strong it shakes his bones, and he struggles not to burst into black and slice open the bodies of every sacrilegious beast in the shop.

The dreadlocked woman slicing meat sports a flamel cross tattooed above her breast. It reminds him of Lust, sickens him to his core. There’s a redhead observing a short, spiky-haired man sniffing at the beef being cut up, but she glances at up at him when the bell in the door tingles. “Wouldja look’t that,” she notes lazily, removing the cigarette from her lips. The spring green tattoos on her flesh bring him to realise that the Vipers exist yet in the deep recesses of Daten. “’Nother stray dog.”

Hearing the very words that have been bouncing around his head for years opens the closed door of his emotions. His eyes narrow. New possessions.

“I’ll pay. For the sausages.” Charity? No, the avarice swallowing him up from the inside would never give him that. Present payment for future payoff is all. “Who’re you?”

“I’m Martel.” She thumbs at the man sniffing extremely intently at the beef. “This is Dolcetters—Dolcetto. You look like you’re’n the run, like me’n ‘im.” Relaxing his hand, he slips it into his pocket. The crumpled notes rustle faintly as he drops them into her palm. “Got a name there, mister?”

He shrugs. The fluffy fur of his vest tickles his lower jaw.

“Call me Greed.”


End file.
